This essay argues for a new approach to teaching criticism on undergraduate English, Cultural Studies and Literature degrees. I critique two attempts to make critical activity comprehensible to students , and I argue that these belong to an authoritarian or state-sponsored pedagogy which fails to tap into the wide variety of traditional, social and generic forms that criticism can take. I suggest that by comparison with the world of beginning novelists, dramatists or poets, literary criticism lacks a writing community. In (...) discussing how this difficulty can be overcome, I emphasize the rational bewilderment of students when confronted with an essay to write. My conclusion is that the writing lives of student critics, and the critics that students read, should be brought into closer, more productive association along thelines of practice and performance in music and art. (shrink)